Older people and technology

Sorry if the title isn't exactly about what I talk here, but I couldn't think of a better one given the character limitations.

Over the years I kept hearing that when it comes to technology, we are more acustomed to it, unlike older people, so when we will be their age we will understand new stuff much better.

But I am not sure to what extent this will be true. For example, my dad (who is 82 years old) was fixing alot of stuff when he was young. He was fixing elevators profesionally but also fixed alot of TV's, radios and alot of electrical stuff in general.

And if I ask him about older technology, he will tell me about how stuff works in surprising detail. Like those old radios with lamps, he seems to know everything about them, or old TV's (from the 70s), and of course elevators. He will tell me how they run, what each component does, and so on. He even fixed the broken engine on the fridge last year,

However, he does not understand new technology at all. When it comes to mobile phones, he can only call someone or answer the phone, he has no idea how to navigate the menus, how the internet works or how to send an SMS. He also has no idea how the receiver on our TV works, and while he can switch channels by dialing the numbers, if he opens one of the more advanced menus by mistake, he will wait for me to come home to go out of it (if it takes more then just pressing the back button he will be lost).

He also does not seem to turn senile or something like that (he will remember stuff very well, and even remind me of events, and when we changed the receiver I had to change the channel numbers to match the old one, and he will tell me the numbers for about 30 channels he likes from memory)

So thats why I've been wondering: Will this happen to us too, will there be a new form of technology that we will just never understand? And I know there are many old people that will be able to navigate a PC or understand the internet much better then my dad, but even then, the majority will not understand nearly as much as we do, especially very old people. It just looks like at some point, people stop understanding new stuff aswell, and we may be just as clueless about new technology like our grandparents are.

At some point you just stop caring about keeping up with the latest advances in technology.

Computers are black magic maths boxes. The sooner you accept that this whole thing is black magic the better off you are.

I don't think it's just that you stop caring, but new things, as of a certain point (i forget the year), use completely different components which he probably never used.

Other than that I think it just becomes difficult to keep up. Just a guess, though.

I remember when people complained about how complicated VCRs were to use- especially timed recording. They weren't, really, but older people constantly complained that they were. It was a thing for a long long time. Used to be you couldn't see any stand up routine without at least one mention of that fact.

But ya. I personally think at some point it just becomes to difficult to keep up with technology because there's usually a drastic change at some point and you have a hard time wrapping your head around it since it's so universally life changing (like computers have been).

There is some laziness to it, too.

And yes. It will happen to us too eventually. At least, assuming technology keeps changing like it has over a relatively short period of time anyway.

Luckily it hasn't happened to me yet. Smart Phones are the closest thing that could potentially but once I finally got one (this year) and started using it- it's not actually that complicated to figure out so I feel I have mastered that now, too.

I'll be really interested to see what kind of technology exists in the future that I'm totally fucking confused and baffled by how any of it works. Getting old is cool, man.

I think I'll reach that stage when we start controlling stuff with our brains.

We're already there. There's not much you can do with it right now but the technology does exist.

@zamolxes Feel free to use me as a smart phone experiment. I'm a software developer by trade but mobile phones simply escape my comprehension simply because I find the technology behind them befuddling and un-intuitive.... so yeah I'm getting old. I liked the old one touch easy Alcatel phones but now I don't care what mobile phone tech is.

Give me a new OS for any type of PC and I know whats what. But phones...Give me hologram watches that produce a screen from my arm and then we're talking what I'm I'm expecting.

For my Dads generation they were promised Jetson like flying planes. Hasn't happened so think about that conundrum also. You lose interest simply because the tech is below your expectations. Also as @corevi said you simply stopped caring.

This is why you never become your family's IT/Help Desk person. Ever.

If they ever ask you to help buy them a computer JUST SAY NO because you will become their on-call person immediately.

My grandparents on my dad's side can use their computers. They don't understand them, but they can use them well enough and they tend to stick to sites they know. Youtube, Wikipedia, their e-mail, and they don't seem to answer e-mails from places they don't know about. Once they stopped letting my cousins use them at will, their computers stopped having issues. And my grandmother on my mother's side does not and will not have a computer. Her cellphone is one of those cheap Tracfones that doesn't do anything more than keep a list of contacts and call people.

Basically, there are only three people in my family that are even remotely computer-literate - me, my brother, and my dad.

@rebel_scum said:

I also generally find smart phones pretty unintuitive. They can do so, so much, but they have to do it all on something that you can fit in your pocket. They wind up feeling slow and clunky compared to using an honest-to-God PC.

EDIT: Why is all my text so fucking huge?

EDIT 2: It's not anymore.

being an adult is about figuring out what you like and being content. At a certain point all that youthful energy is just about insecure kids keeping up with the other insecure kids because that's what kids do, that's what keeps trends growing. You stop doing that when you're older cus it takes too much energy to care about that stuff constantly.

Using Google to search for scholastic article is a great learning tool, as I'm sure most of us know.

The prefontal cortex is an important portion of the brain in terms of learning ability. It changes in ways throughout the latter end of staging in a way that inhibits learning.

From an abstract I found

"In young subjects, rTMS of the right DLPFC interfered with retrieval more than left DLPFC stimulation. The asymmetry of the effect progressively vanished with aging, as indicated by bilateral interference effects on recognition performance. Conversely, the predominance of left DLPFC effect during encoding was not abolished in elders, thus probing its causal role for encoding along the life span. Findings confirm that the neural correlates of retrieval modify along aging, suggesting that the bilateral engagement of the DLPFC has a compensatory role on the elders' episodic memory performance." -Rossi, S. et al

Well there's a couple factors at play. There's no question younger pre-20's minds learn new things much quicker and readily than older ones

However like any skill you learn, you maintain it as long as you keep with the changes as they happen. If you don't use it, you lose it. Bottom line is that it is a choice.

Most folks have limited interest or time to do that, so many will reach a point where they say "I'm good" and not bother keeping up with one thing or another. Once you stop doing that, it's really hard to get caught back up.

@slag: remember though, that there IS biology behind a decay of learning skills... however I do agree with keeping old skills being a choice.

This is certainly a factor as well. Especially in the first 10 years of growth. For example, an adult might take a couple years to learn a new language and speak it with fluency but even then they'd still have an accent. If you teach a child of a certain age 2 languages at once they'll be fluent in both and lack an accent for either. As paradigms are made in technology and kids grow up with this stuff they'll be effortlessly fluent in ways an adult would require years of training to get to. And with that fluency create new technology, which in turn the next generation will be fluent at. This is how progress happens.

So people acting like old people need to get with the times and aren't trying hard enough to adapt, understand even if your mindset never changes, one day the youth of tomorrow will be saying the same shit about you as you struggle with your hologram or whatever. Its just biology.

Eh...I think a lot of people aren't interested in technology in general. As they get older they begin to completely lose touch. There are plenty of middle aged people in the tech industry who are current, and I assume they will stay that way as long as they want.

Part could be that older tech was built with components that do what they are designed to do. Nowadays components do whatever they are programmed to do (this is of course hugely simplified thought). A chip is a chip but can do much more than say a transistor.

Also the fact that was earlier said: you stop caring. This of course depends on the individual (happened to me shortly after hitting 30 couple years back (also I hate things that try to multiple things as often they do everything badly - but that is a whole other discussion)).

My friend tried multiple times to get his father, who is only in his early 60's and not really technology deficient, to play video games. He just could not get the dual thumbsticks to make sense. I think it just has to do with what you're exposed to over the years, and anyone who didn't grow up playing video games would have a hard time coordinating their fingers to something as alien as a controller.

Probably more of a lack of interest though.

My dad types with his pointer fingers, because he never really needed even a type writer when he was younger, so he never became proficient or comfortable with it.

Airplanes can't really fly you know.

It isn't about 'old people', it's about everyone and how they treat the incremental advancements in technology. Have you ever met anyone who said something like, "I refuse to text on my phone because if I want to talk I'll just call them" or maybe something like, "Why should I upgrade to Windows 8 when Windows XP still works totally fine?" On their face, these are legitimate statements. Most improvements in technology are not so large as to actually provide much added value beyond their novelty. However, once you forego enough incremental advancements and then finally are forced into an upgrade, the little changes have accumulated to the point that they seem entirely unintuitive and the learning required is much higher. It's something I try to be very conscious of - whenever I have a thought like, "Do I really need this?" I also think about my last boss and whether I want to end up like him when it comes to technology in 20 years.

I think for the most part, it's all based on the tech you familiarize yourself with. Like for most of us who use computers and smartphones, we'll retain knowledge on how these and other devices that utilize software work. Like how your dad is familiar with more analogue tech like engines, cathode ray tubes and similar technology. One day there might be some tech that we will be baffled by, because advances might come along that defy the way we perceive how everything works. Then we'll ask our kids to set that stuff up for us, while we tell them how we "ctrl+alt+del" most of our tech issues away.

There's a difference from understanding the underlying technology compared to understanding interfaces; being able to scan the design and text in front of you and understand what its trying to communicate is completely different than knowing the ins and outs of a CRT TV.

As for whether you'll get to that point or not, depends. I work tech support for a Cable company (not U.S., so leave your Time Warner, Comcast, ect complains out of my darn inbox!) and ratio I get of older customers who actually do know more than you'd think is quite astounding, and it largely comes from them sitting down and paying attention to what these different parts of the interface mean, which is a problem for UI designers because it should be more universal than that.

You father learned and developed learning patterns before the rise of the computer. The computer age and the internet has fundamentally changed the way we consume information and the base knowledge of your average human has increased dramatically over the past 30 years. We learn differently now. Unless something else comes along to replace how we now all interact with the world, I think we'll get along just fine as old bastards.

It's just a theory though.

I taught my 80 years old grandma how to browse news on the internet, and my 55 years old mother how to make tests in a word document (she works in a church school). While they still ask for help quite often, i do believe older people can pick up new tech as long as they put in the time to learn.

Can't tell. My dad got into computers around the year 2000, mostly because I wanted one and my brother needed one and we are both technological morons (even if I grew out of it in recent years) and he's been doing fairly well with fixing, tweaking and using them beyond your standard watch/listen/read. Nothing really eluded him in a way that he didn't understand - one of my most treasured memories is the two of us playing Thief: The Dark Project together, trying to figure it out how to stealth and us and my brother trying to finish Tomb Raider II (that fucking motorboat sequence in Venice can suck my dick and I'll find a way to make it happen). He mostly didn't get into video games because of not being dextrous enough and not having the time to invest - I imagine he would enjoy slower-paced stuff like XCOM if I could convince him to try, but alas. I still catch him watching me play games and I distinctly remember him just sitting and watching me play Batman Arkham Asylum, The Last of Us and GTA V for a couple of hours. Phones he also uses quite fine, even if he doesn't like smartphones because he doesn't need most of their functionality besides texting, calling and making photos. I guess, however, that it all makes sense since he's an electrotechnician, so he had to be attached at the hip to most technological nuance for 30+ years, especially around the time when communism fell in Poland and new technologies became something meaningful.

What I'm saying is is that what really matters is one's interest in technology. My mother has barely any interest in how things work, so teaching her using a mouse and keyboard is a nightmare, even if she's eager to learn, so we have to use different methods or patterns to get her to understand them. My dad, though, works out fine. My brother is 37 and watching him use a smartphone is like observing a toddler play with a gun most of the time. I personally don't get VR and non-standard interfacing (Kinect, Virtuix Omni), but that's mostly because it's being used in exceedingly boring ways so far.

@zamolxes: I am 39 and will be 40 next month. It's not that I'm an old man yet or anything, it's that I am seeing the early trends and can extrapolating forward. I find that as time passes, the process of being able to focus on something and learn it to get harder and harder every year. I used to be able to learn every aspect of game rules, be competitive in shooters and timing based games, know all the menus of a VCR or an answering machine, learn what every menu and right-click action does in a new OS, and learn lyrics to new songs no problem.

But now as I am getting older, I find that I can't compete at all in any FPS, I can't pitch whatsoever in MLB The Show, I can't learn song lyrics no matter how hard I try, I get lost in some of the more technical menus of my wife's android phone ( I have an iphone from work and was not an early smartphone adopter), and I hate Windows 8 because they moved everything.

I am guessing that as I get older the mind has lost its elasticity and every time I want to do something on a device or a new game I kinda have to relearn it to an extent. The most painful part of any game is having to slog through it learning the level design and building a muscle memory for how to play. If you have to basically redo that every time, you're going to grow sour to it and tend not to want to do it anymore.

It's not that we get more busy, it's just that things are taking more time to learn and we have less patience now and get tired sitting and focusing for hours at a time. We tend to want to use the things we already know. I play NHL every year and play a lot of retro NES/Genesis/Arcade games because I can have a great time and don't have to relearn anything.

Shit this was a depressing reply to write. Hopefully I'm totally wrong and I'm just ADD and have too many games to play though :P

I'm going to have to say, pretty much this. With the advent of computers that -everyone- has access to, and the internet being able to feed our brains information in seconds, those who adopted and embraced technology in the 90's, or grew up in the 90's with it has our brains programmed differently than people who did not grow up with that skill set.

I also wouldn't quite say that the base knowledge set of people has grown. I think that with the internet and our instant gratification generation, it's become quite the opposite. People skip learning the basics of things so they can get to a middle ground. Like people who can only reproduce songs on a guitar because they looked up the tabs. Or people who can only cook strictly off recipes and have no idea what an individual spice tastes like.

Someone also mentioned brain elasticity, and I think that plays into it as well. Once you've figured out what you're doing in life, you tend to do the same things day in and day out. New concepts just don't jive; especially if they don't mingle well with your own perceived thoughts as to how things should work.

I'm unable to find it now, but I seem to recall a study about 6-9 months ago showing that kids today have a lesser understanding of technology than previous generations. Specifically, people who grew up in the 70's, 80's and 90's understand how computers work on a deeper level, with a general understanding of how the various parts interact with each other, whereas the generation growing up today does not have an understanding of the machines beyond the superficial software level, and are unable to troubleshoot their computers, phones or tablets if they encounter any problems. So while it's generally has been true that the next generation have had a better knowledge of current technology than previous generations, that seems to no longer be true.

To be honest, while I can build a computer completely from scratch and I know a few programming languages, when my tablet broke I had no idea what to do and bought a new one.

With a computer you can tinker at a level that you just can't with a smartphone/tablet, both on the software and hardware level. Getting an old game to run on modern hardware is not hard if you have google and know how to open .cfg files, but if a game doesn't work on a tablet I'm lost.

No age. I am computer-interested, but I have a driving force for that. Also no problem building PC's, though that is really just a modular exercise.

I still have not played one mobile app game. On the other hand, I just discovered my I-phone with the huge-ass payments, is actually a first rate audio player. Battery holds up too. I then did my fav. radio station app. so I could listen to them.

Life is looking up, technology wise.

Over the years I kept hearing that when it comes to technology, we are more acustomed to it, unlike older people, so when we will be their age we will understand new stuff much better.

You'd need a crystal ball or a time machine to know that wouldn't you. I'd say what happens to our parents and grandparents are a pretty good indicator of what we'll be going through. When you're old you'll understand the stuff you learned when you were younger just fine, but you'll "lose interest" in the new stuff coming out. "The old stuff works just fine." The new stuff will be "unnecessary," "trendy," "a fad." The curious mind you have when you're young fades away as you age. Learning new things becomes stressful and you'll avoid it if you can. Being self-aware about this you can change it, remember you can only really judge the utility of something until after you've used it competently. That's still if you want to, if you find it rewarding, but you may or may not find your feelings have also changed.